In the opening scene of Anne Poiret’s documentary Welcome to Refugeestan, the viewers are instructed to “imagine” that they are among the 17 million individuals across the world currently living in refugee camps. Beginning a journey that they have little control over, they “enter a parallel universe” of restriction as they are rendered, along with the subjects of the documentary, “invisible to the rest of the world.” Poiret, a Paris-based filmmaker and broadcast journalist whose recent work includes an episode on the Kashmir conflict in the series La case du siècle and the 2015 documentary Libya: An Impossible Nation State?, escorts viewers through refugee camps in Kenya, Tanzania, Jordan, and on the border of Greece/Macedonia, as well as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offices in Switzerland and field trainings in Norway, to illustrate the contemporary refugee experience post-flight.

Poiret’s use of second-person narration positions the viewer to empathize with the lack of autonomy that so often characterizes this experience. In an interview with Radio France Internationale, she explains that her desire was to destabilize Western perceptions of refugeehood as being something that only happens in far-away countries, noting that “we all could be a refugee at some point” (http://en.rfi.fr/general/20160619-welcome-refugeestan). The simulated experience of the viewer connotes the clearly educational intentions present in each scene of the documentary, as one learns of and follows in the steps of those “migrants stalled in the course of their uncompleted migration process” who live “on the margins of the states, in a spatial, legal, and political in-between zone” (Michel Agier, “What Contemporary Camps Tell Us About the World to Come.” Humanity, vol. 7 (3), 2016).

The viewer begins what is, on average, a seventeen-year residency in camps by registering with the UNHCR in Nyarugusu, a camp in Tanzania wherein freedom of movement is restricted by law. A humanitarian worker then explains the core-relief items (CRIs) a refugee can expect to be given once inside a camp, despite the fact that such items are frequently missing due to logistical issues. Once acquainted with the daily experience of endless queues, the viewer takes a trip by truck with UNHCR site-planner CK, who struggles to prevent the arbitrary and unauthorized building of latrines for the unanticipated influx of refugees who arrived at the camp over the weekend.

The documentary then shifts regions to Norway, where the viewer is indoctrinated on the trainings given to new UNHCR recruits. Pivoting from the refugee experience to the UNHCR officer experience, seven days of theory and three days of practical training are conveyed through interviews with and footage of trainees role-playing in simulations with pseudo leaders of nations, who must be convinced to allow for the creation of new camps in their territories. Returning to the refugee perspective, in Dadaab, Kenya, the viewer enters the world’s largest refugee camp (350,000 inhabitants), in which humanitarian workers are segregated from refugees by barbed wire fencing as a safety precaution.

Interviews with numerous scholars are interspersed throughout the documentary as Alexander Betts, Director of the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford, and anthropologist Michel Agier (among others) discuss issues of encampment, noting that it is frequently regarded as an emergency “temporary” solution that too often extends into perpetuity. Armed with this knowledge, the viewer journeys next to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, where adaptations and innovations for camps are being considered. This insight into UNHCR operations leads to Azraq, a camp in Jordan intended to be cutting-edge in its facilities, outfitted with the support of the likes of Swedish furniture giant IKEA. Designed as a model for future camps, in reality Azraq has been shunned by refugees, who deprecate its “soulless” rows of shipping-container living spaces. The camp doubles as a laboratory in which temperamental biometric technologies are tried out on the population. Instead of receiving CRIs such as blankets and soap, refugees at Azraq are given debit cards which allow them the freedom to shop in a supermarket for items of their choosing. However, the high cost of goods in the sole supermarket that the card works in, combined with the inability of refugees to work to supplement their income, has led to great dissatisfaction among the Azraq population. Finally, the viewer is transported to the border of Greece/Macedonia, where a transit area has spontaneously evolved into a camp for Eritreans and Somalis who are prevented from crossing.

The institutional as opposed to geographical focus of Welcome to Refugeestan distinguishes it from other documentaries on refugeehood that most often center on flight or assimilation. By focusing on this in-between stage of existential limbo, Poiret’s documentary differs from those within the canon of African film that have received acclaim for their focus on assimilation (such as Christopher Quinn’s 2006 God Grew Tired of Us and Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk’s 2003 Lost Boys of Sudan). Poiret’s documentary covers not only the African but the global refugee experience as well, a trend also followed by Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary Human Flow, which spans twenty-three countries. Such works depart from a contemporary focus that has privileged the European refugee crisis and Syrian camps as particular sites of interest (such as Stephen Ching and Ellen Martinez’ 2016 After Spring and Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci’s 2015 Salam Neighbor). What ultimately sets Welcome to Refugeestan apart, however, is its use of second-person narration to illustrate first-hand the unanticipated experience of arriving at and existing in a refugee camp. The danger with such a focus is that it glosses over the causal factors of displacement and the traumatic experience of flight. The narrative technique also risks being too overtly didactic. Each new scene that confronts the viewer is a reminder that the simulation is making your choices for you. As a result, the viewer wonders whether the film is dictating exactly what to think or how to feel, and whether there is an opportunity to draw one’s own conclusions about what is being presented. Despite these faults, Poiret’s work does successfully convey the otherwise alien and alienating experience of “becoming a citizen in the land of camps” through this unique role-playing framework.